Monthly Archives

September 2015

by Barry Goldstein The Pennsylvania Attorney General is now following-up by investigating some of the people who helped Jerry Sandusky continue to molest boys long after he should have been discovered and stopped. A recent news report described a meeting between the young man known at the Sandusky trial as victim #1, his mother and school officials. The boy had revealed Sandusky’s abuse

By Barry Goldstein Gender Bias At least 40 states and many judicial districts have created court-sponsored gender bias committees. Although they have used widely varied approaches and strategies over a few decades, they have all found substantial gender bias against women. In earlier studies there was a focus on unwanted touching and inappropriate requests for dates or sex. This was almost entirely something

By Barry Goldstein To treat people who are fundamentally different or in different circumstances as if they were the same is unfair and should be stopped. The problem is that this false equivalency is easy to miss and there are often abusive and manipulative people who seek to take advantage of it. In fairness this false equivalency also is allowed to continue because

by Louise Armstrong: A summary by Janet Dodd, (surrounding an internet discussion on CPS): The book is fabulous. Historically, the concept of “family privacy”, has functioned, in practice, as protection from public scrutiny for families headed by able-bodied, middle-class (and above), white, hetero-sexual men. You show very clearly in your book that for the most part it still does. This makes legal policies and procedures

In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from. As McIntosh points out,

Phyllis B. Frank and Gail Kadison Golden Codependency is an increasingly popular term for describing an expanding population of individuals. This concept, originally identified by drug and alcohol counselors, was formulated to describe those individuals who make relationships with substance abusers, enable them, and fail to leave them even after it becomes clear that the relationship is a damaging one (Rockland County Department of

by Barry Goldstein The United States Department of Justice offered some good news to long suffering protective mothers and their children when it announced grants to courts in Illinois, Delaware, Minnesota and Oregon to develop improved practices to protect battered women and their children. Incredibly, the abusers’ lobby objects to any possible reforms to promote children’s safety out of concern the improved practices might

Improving the Safety of Children involved in Child Custody Cases The thrust of our Safe Child Act is that courts must make the health and safety of children the first priority in any decision about child custody and visitation. Although there is a long history of society treating children like property, it is hard to imagine that any other consideration could take precedence in

Quincy Solution to Haskell Murder By Barry Goldstein Many people were shocked and saddened over a tragic story from Spring, Texas in which domestic abuser Ron Lee Haskell was looking for his ex-wife and went to the home of her sister and brother-in-law demanding to know where she was. When they were unable to tell him, Haskell executed the two parents and their